Personal Space Invader
Personal Space Invader
A Human Life and the Death of Interiority
This year we received confirmation from the Pentagon of the identification of unidentifiable flying objects. Eerily coincidentally, we witnessed the unexplained appearance and disappearance of a mysterious steel prism in the Utah desert. Each of these were barely newsworthy.
What preoccupied the public consciousness for most of the year were space invaders of a more personal kind.
Not in Eden Anymore
“And it’s hard to be a human being. And it’s harder as anything else.” - Modest Mouse | 1
For all of human history we have faced invaders from without. Only in recent times has our primeval fear been temporarily pacified by the illusion of eternal peace in the developed world. While precarious under extreme conditions, technological innovations in civic and economic institutions, as well as material, scientific, and engineering feats, have neutered much of the prospects of kinetic warfare reaching the shores of even semi-functioning societies. This has been accomplished through a coordinated assault on two preventative fronts: 1. By disincentivizing the use of violence by providing more abundance through cooperation and trade, than is be gained through pillage and force, and 2. By deterring large-scale overt conventional warfare with the threat of nuclear arsenals. The combination of these two guards against much of what our ancestors would have faced as a not improbable experience once, twice, or even multiple times, in a lifetime. Nevermind that our natural predators have been all but subdued. Man as predator of man has all but lost its meaning. Today’s predators are far more likely to show up in suits under the auspices of some euphemism, like Mergers & Acquisitions, or be unscrupulously sitting behind the desk of a payday loan lending office, than to roll up on Massachusetts Bay in longboats bearing battle axes. (Though, there might be a stronger community response if they did.)
In times before, when existential threats were more immediate and omnipresent, the sense of one’s physical, familial, and tribal possessions ever being truly secure was simply unaffordable. Those not on constant guard didn’t last long. Societies which neglected this basic truth disappeared or were conquered.
Daydreaming
“Dream is the personalized myth. Myth, the depersonalized dream.” - Joseph Campbell | 2
Of course, losing sight of our inherent vulnerability is one of the perennial follies of man. For this reason, the mythological literature is rife with reminders. From Sumerian flood myths, to Grimm fairy tales, much of our cultural inheritance, spanning vast temporal and geographical contexts, pays tribute to our unending arrogance, naïveté, and forgetfulness. Nevertheless, the historical record is punctuated with cultures that became too decadent, corrupt, or passive, to be prepared for barbarians at the gates. When Visigoths sacked Rome for the first time in nearly 800 years, residents were genuinely shocked to see Alaric’s men march in through the Salarian Gate. Whether accessed through treachery or attrition, the city was despoiled. In any case, the cardinal sin was a failure of vigilance. To forget one’s myths is to be left adrift, unmoored from the grounding of lessons in eternal recurrence.
A Mind of One’s Own
“The mind as a place of its own, and in itself can make a heaven of hell and a hell of heaven” - John Milton | 3
With lockdowns in place, much of our personal lives has been exposed to the whims of corporate and government intermediaries. While this process of technological integration of work, play, sustenance, and intimacy, has been underway for quite some time, the acceleration of the presence of these historical forces in daily life over the past nine months has never been greater. Indeed, much of what makes social distancing feasible in the extreme has been the injection of corporate and institutional go-betweens to mediate the tasks of daily existence. Amazon and Doordash take care of (and track) your consumption habits. Youtube and Netflix provide endless, contactless entertainment. Zoom and Twitter take the place of proximal interpersonal correspondence. I wont mention the pseudo-solutions for loss of intimacy, though anyone with an internet connection knows their names. This all comes with it an attendant exposure of the inner world to the outer. With each substitution of the normal trappings of human affairs by technology services and providers comes a loss of the fundamentally personal and private characteristics of our internal lives. Spotify might know when you’re sad, homesick, or lovestruck. Maybe Google can’t see you when you’re sleeping, but it certainly knows when you’re awake. Trust and Safety commissions know when you’ve been bad or good, so be good, for goodness’ sake. And these are just the voluntary, self-inflicted incursions on our interior lives.
The Hand That Eats
Governments are envious of what we’ve ceded to capital for convenience. In their attempts to protect us from the invader without, they have themselves become the invader within; issuing dictums on every aspect of how we may work, play, worship, and congregate. If corporations filled the space between us with apps and information products, then governments set the stage by forcing us apart. Overreaches on personal liberty tolerated in the name of protection would have been unimaginable for most Americans a mere 10 months ago. As we’ve seen from the rank hypocrisy, arbitrariness, and selectivity of many government officials and policies, to say that some are opportunistically seizing powers they can neither steward, nor deserve, would be an understatement. Expect the grip to loosen only with consistent countervailing force in the years that follow.
“I pray my children will forgive me, though I bade the river flood.
I have washed my hands a thousand times, but still can see the blood.” - La Dispute | 4
What to make of this intrusion on the interior world by outside forces? In the most literal sense, the virus remains the personal space invader at the root of these other (hopefully temporary) invasions. An attack at the biological layer not only circumvents much of our reliable defenses, but also brings the fear of a most personal invasion, that of the body itself, to the fore of our minds. It is this occupancy and observance of the mind that constitutes the most thorough, deepest invasion - the death of an interior life. Was our failure of vigilance not two-fold? First, a failure to remain vigilant of nature’s wrath, and her unforgiving vengeance on all who sit too comfortably in their arrogance and contentment. And second, a failure to remain vigilant of the encroachment on personal space by actors promising to preserve just that? If only the guard at the Salarian Gate had been wearing his N95.
Thank you for reading, for subscribing, and for passing this along to friends, family, acquaintances, and total strangers who might benefit. The beauty of the internet is you get to decide what you’ll do with it, but you never know who it might find. I hope it found you well today. ‘Till next time.
Modest Mouse. “Baby Blue Sedan”. In Building Something Out of Nothing. Up Records, 2000, CD.
Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with A Thousand Faces. New York: Pantheon Books, 1968.
Milton, John, and Anna Baldwin. Paradise Lost. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.
La Dispute. "Sad Prayers for Guilty Bodies." In Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair. No Sleep Records, 2008, CD.